schoolboy

A schoolboy is a boy who attends school. Uniform, satchel, and somewhere else he would rather be.

The word is slightly old-fashioned in the plain sense, since most modern writing says pupil or student. It survives strongly as an adjective describing behaviour and mistakes, so a schoolboy error is a basic and embarrassing one, and schoolboy humour is exactly what it sounds like. The matching word is schoolgirl. There is a whole genre of British fiction built around the schoolboy that shaped the language for a century.

Phrases it lives in

• a schoolboy error — a basic and embarrassing mistake